Tuesday, June 19, 2012

from the common good to private goods: race, class and property

Given the ambiguity of the concept of Salus - in which it designates both the forces of Health/Liberating Power, as well as the forces of Dominating Power – the preceding should come as no surprise.

What deserves to be noted here is that throughout this period,
beginning in the 12th century in England, but occurring mostly
between 1750 and 1850, much of the common good,[1]
that is, the land that had been historically held in common, was enclosed by
numerous Enclosure Acts and parceled off, turned into commodities and sold. In
other words, the common good was turned into the private good – and the maxim salus
populi was generally invoked purely ideologically, in order to serve the
interests of the rising merchant class. In many respects it was their health,
rather than the health of people in general – with which their health was, in
actuality, in conflict – that was invoked as the supreme law.

While it has come to be regarded as natural, and
inevitable, the entire institution of private property is merely an arbitrary historical development - one constructed out of the purely abstract notion that pieces of land can be construed of as commodities. Laws then cement this idea into place.

When people compare present conditions with those of the
Feudal Era, they must not neglect to consider the fact that as abject as conditions
were for the peasantry, the Feudal peasant had just as much of a ‘right’ to
live on the land s/he inhabited as did her overlord - their rights inhering in the very same title.
As such, in the Middle Ages there was no homelessness as we understand it modernly. It was only once land was commodified and subjected to the demands of the
market that the practice of renting properties for habitation became
widespread. Before this time, people maintained a subsistence economy, only going
to market to trade their surplus, or to acquire luxury items. The ‘compulsion’
of going to market (the compulsion of Ananke) was a result of this great
dispossession of what had always been held in common. As Marx writes, “By the
nineteenth century, the very memory of the connection between the agricultural
laborer and community property has, of course, vanished. To say nothing of more
recent times.”[2]

As George Orwell writes apropos the distinction
between public and private property: "Stop to consider how the so-called
owners of the land got hold of it. They simply seized it by force… In the case
of the enclosure of the common lands… the land-grabbers did not even have the
excuse of being foreign conquerors; they were quite frankly taking the heritage
of their own countrymen, upon no sort of pretext except that they had the power
to do so.”[3]

“The Parliamentary form of the robbery is that of
‘Bills for Inclosure of Commons’. In other words decrees by which the
landowners grant themselves the people’s land as private property.”[4]

As the commons was enclosed, deforming the public good
into a private good, we see here at work the invocation of Salus by the courts;
but it is the invocation of that form of salus that Machiavelli refers to, that is in opposition to the
conditions for health. As such, it is a type of Dis-ease. This is not an
un-literal description of the conditions that befell the former possessors of
the commons.

“It is no uncommon thing for four or five wealthy
graziers to engross a large enclosed lordship which was before in the hands of
twenty of thirty farmers, and as many smaller tenants and proprietors. All
these are hereby thrown out of their living with their families and many other
families who were chiefly employed an supported by them.”[5]

Deprived of their former resources, many could only
offset starvation by theft. Herein lies the origin of the term villain as a
designation for a criminal. Until this time, the term villein and villeiny
referred to a peasant, and the peasantry. That these became synonymous with,
respectively, criminals and criminality is illustrative of the extent to which
the peasantry was uprooted by the enclosures of and alienation from their land.

Expelled from their ancestral homes, this freshly created class of poor people
were treated with extreme harshness. From the reign of Henry VIII and well into
the eighteenth century, any person caught begging would be deemed a vagabond
and sentenced to six months imprisonment. A second violation received a
two-year prison sentence. A third violation earned its perpetrator a sentence
of death.[6]
Theft, as well, was punished with death, and to such an extent that in the
reign of Henry VIII (1509-1547) alone “72,000 great and petty thieves were put
to death.”[7]
Prison and poorhouse populations exploded. Multitudes were sent off to the
colonies. Resistance to this Disease was met with swift and violent punishment.

As Foucault writes, “it is perfectly obvious that from
the end of the Middle Ages up until the eighteenth century, all the laws
against beggars and vagabonds and the idle, all the police organizations
designed to catch them, forced them – and this was of course their role – to
accept… the conditions imposed on them, which were extremely bad. If they
rejected these conditions, if they went away, if they took to begging or ‘to
doing nothing’, then it was prison and often forced labor.”[8]

During this period of history the people subjugated to
this Dominating Power were divided into three main groups. The first was put to
work in the service of this new economy directly. Another group, though
not a member of the Power group, policed their neighbors in the service of the
Power group,[9] thereby
serving the new economy indirectly. The third group was comprised of
undesirables: criminals, the insane, the sick, beggars, vagabonds, etc. To this
end, the concept of Salus as justification for Dominating Power was also directed. Those that resisted the new
arrangement were branded (often literally) as criminals. And it would not be
long before a pseudo-science sought to explain this criminality - deflecting peoples' attention from the actual causes of these conditions of disease.[10] To be sure, in the 19th
century in French studies of the social origins of disease, the poor were identified as “a race
apart,” a barbarian, uncivilized multitude.[11]

One of the founding studies of what came to be known as
Criminal Anthropology, the Swiss deacon Johann Kaspar Lavater’s Physiognomische
Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe (1775–1778), presented arguments linking physical
characteristics to crime at the very same time that the pseudo-scientific
concept of Race was being constructed, further allowing those in Power to
maintain their position of dominance. That is to say, salus/power’s ascendancy
during this period is intertwined with salus/health’s subordination.

When one considers the history of the deformation of
the ‘common good’ into the ‘private good’, which rapidly accelerated with
mechanized forms of production during the Industrial Revolution, one is
confronted by not only the enclosures and the privatization of one major type
of commons, land (and its products), one recognizes that privatization would
also extend to include even the human person. For what was the slave if not a formerly
free entity that was deformed into a ‘good’, that is, a piece of property, or
the ‘private good’? Etymologically similar to the word ‘cattle’, which itself
derives from the middle Latin capitale,
a chattel is a piece of property, and it was this status as property that
distinguished 18th and 19th century chattel slavery, from
earlier, as well as subsequent, forms of the practice.

It is important to bear in mind that the first African
slaves to arrive in North America in 1619 were not regarded nor treated as
chattels. In the early years of the North American colonies the status of slave
did not demarcate a permanent condition of bondage, nor was it based on the
newly developed concept of “race.” Rather, it was used interchangeably with the
term ‘indentured servant.’ Differentiated from the European indentured
servants, if at all, along on the lines of their status as Christians, the African
indentured servants and the European servants, dispossessed of their ancestral
lands, for the most part found themselves in the New World in similar straits.
To be sure, in 1676 black and white indentured servants fought together against
the ruling elites in Bacon’s Rebellion. It was in large part due to this threat
of revolution by a united underclass that the ruling elites adopted divisive
racist policies.[12]

While physical differences were recognized, these were
not tremendously important in the early years of the 17th century.
One’s status as a Christian was a far more important determinate of one’s opportunities. By the end of the 18th century, however, when the slave
trade was at its apex, the new system based on race was firmly entrenched and
powerfully divided the masses of people in the newly formed United States. Now encoded in the law, ‘race’ – as a subspecies of dominating power – successfully
set at odds the great majority of people to toil all their lives for
practically the sole benefit of an elite minority of wealthy landowners,
industrialists and bankers.

This category of race is by no means natural. To be sure, when Carolus Linnaeus published his Systema
Naturae, the “founding document of
taxonomy,” in 1758, for example, it contained no notion of racial superiority.
Human beings were divided into four groups, based on geography. By the time his
student, J.F. Blumenbach prepared the third edition of his own work, his De
Generis Humane Varietate Nativa in 1795,
however, he had made one significant alteration of his mentor’s system.

“By moving from the Linnaean four-race system to his
own five-race scheme, Blumenbach radically changed the geometry of human order
from a geographically based model without explicit ranking to a hierarchy of
worth, oddly based upon perceived beauty.”[13]

Throughout the 17th and 18th
centuries, the concrete supports of health, the conditions for health, as
imperfect as they were, were being dismantled and privatized.[14]
During the period leading up to the Glorious Revolution, and through the French
Revolution, the maxim salus populi suprema lex esto was cited repeatedly in support of this aim.
While it invoked the public health and the public good as synonyms for freedom
and as the rationale for political freedom, there was wrapped within this a
narrowly economic notion of salus populi. That is, the liberatory form of
health, health as something supportive of freedom, came into opposition with an
economic understanding of health – the health of the owners’ resources: the
population, the worker, and the slave. Among other things, health was, from the point of view of
the owners of capital, conceived of as part of an investment, as a production
cost, while the notion of ‘population,’ created at this time, came
to designate an economic resource that is in need of maintenance and
regulation.[15] Health in
this sense is merely instrumental to the economic advancement of the business
class.

People were regarded as tools of the owners of the
economic system. As such, it is not health at all, but its mere semblance that was under consideration. The
converse of this understanding of population as a tool of the economy is the
notion that the economy is a tool of its people. In the former sense, where health is equivalent to dominating power, health is but a justification for a type of order. In the latter, where health is equivalent to liberating power, health
is regarded as an end in itself, to which
economics must be subjugated.

The Enlightenment view of health, however, was not
entirely black and white. While economic forces were dominant, and
imperialistic, real improvements were achieved in sanitation and public health
in general and significant advances were made in the field of science. Alongside the
economic changes fueling, among other things, the slave trade, there was a
genuine Enlightenment concern with what came to be known at the time as
‘civilization.’ However, while, for example, Cesare Beccaria, and Thomas Jefferson,
among others, took an interest in reforming the colonial era’s legal codes,
eschewing the harsher forms of punishment such as the cutting off of ears, and
ending the death penalty for all but murder,[16]
subtending this seemingly sincere desire for reform lay the fact that the
disciplinary system was only able to be reformed because it was in the nascent
state’s interest to reform it. It made greater economic sense to lock people up
in penitentiaries and to extract their labor from them than to spend energy
mutilating them, destroying this free source of labor power.

So, while
potentially liberatory, the advances in science and public health that were
implemented were done so in a generally one-sided, dominating manner, only blending further
the dual meaning of Salus (health and power/ the good and the necessary/the
good and utility). In the 19th century in the United States, for
example, the maxim salus populi appealed to the primacy of the public health in
order to remove slaughterhouses, tanneries and other offensive businesses and practices from city centers, among other things. And these
removals, in the name of the health of the people, were in fact accomplished.
Yet, at the same time that this notion of the health of the people is
apparently exerting its authority, there is also widespread, institutional
slavery. That these could exist side by side does not reflect any
inconsistency. On the contrary, it is consistent with the owners’ notion of
health – their health and the health of an economy that is designed to further aggrandize their health. Aside from a few people outside the ‘mainstream,’ even
the term society had nothing to do with the universal humankind of the stoics,
but meant a particular type of society, benefiting only a thin slice of the
“populi” – that is, not the “populi” at all.

[1] The commons, pasturing land that was
held in common for centuries, was made alienable beginning in England in the
Middle Ages…

[10] In his Utopia (1516), Sir
Thomas More attributes the rise in crime to the enclosure of common lands:
“…the nobility and gentry, and even those holy men, the abbots not contented
with the old rents which their farms yielded, nor thinking it enough that they,
living at their ease, do no good to the public, resolve to do it hurt instead
of good. They stop the course of agriculture, destroying houses and towns,
reserving only the churches, and enclose grounds that they may lodge their
sheep in them.”